Filibuster follies

That's the big question as we head into the sixth week of a record federal government shutdown.

We keep hearing that the filibuster is a powerful weapon in the U.S. Senate.

But the ordinary American doesn't know what it is, where it came from, who's in favor of it and what good or bad things it has been used for throughout history.

In corner-bar language, the filibuster is basically a Senate-made house rule that allows a single member to prolong a debate or prevent a full vote on a bill by talking about it forever unless 60 members vote to force him to sit down and shut up.

The filibuster slowly evolved, starting in 1805 or so, but its major debut was in 1837.

That was when a bunch of Whig senators who hated President Andrew Jackson blathered on for days to prevent the Senate from expunging an old censure of Jackson for refusing to turn documents over to Congress.

The Whigs won the day because they were still talking when the legislative session expired, so the Senate just packed up and went home.

Debate in the Senate was unlimited and unstoppable until 1917, when it invented its powerful cloture rule.

That's the procedure that allows a majority to kill a filibuster and shut the minority up.

If 66 percent of the total members (since lowered to 60 actual senators) vote to overturn the filibuster, the bill or whatever it is that's being held up can be put to a final vote.

All this inside-baseball parliamentary stuff is what they are referring to when they joke that making laws is like making sausage — too ugly to watch.

The filibuster was usually a minor tool used to slow legislation down until World War I.

Then some Republicans trying to keep us out of the war in Europe used it to delay and ultimately defeat the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1948 some liberal Democrat senators used it to slow down or amend the anti-communist "witch hunts."

And until 1965 racist Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd infamously used long filibusters to repeatedly block Republican civil rights bills in the Senate.

In the last 50 years it has become a parliamentary super-weapon, but Democrats have changed some rules to make it easier to get their pet bills passed — rules they have lived to regret.

The biggest one was in 2013, when Harry Reid dreamed up what he thought then was a clever way to end the Republican filibuster that was holding up Obama's federal judgeships.

What has become known as the "nuclear option," it allowed the majority party in the Senate to end filibusters by the minority party. Instead of needing 60 votes to close debate, it could be done with a simple majority of 51.

We now know that the Republicans got the last — and most historic filibuster laugh.

By using the Democrats' own nuclear weapon, Republicans stopped Democrats from filibustering Trump's three conservative Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and got them confirmed.

Today during the government shutdown, Democrats are filibustering spending bills and driving Trump crazier than usual.

He wants Senate Republicans under John Thune to "nuke the filibuster" so he can get his MAGA agenda quickly through Congress while he has a slim majority.

He's willing to risk Democrats retaking the White House and Congress in three years and Republicans having no filibuster power to stop the legislative reign of terror the left will inflict on the country.

President Trump's MAGA faithful are cheering him on. Sen. Thune says he doesn't have the votes he needs to nuke the filibuster.

Lots of Republicans are terrified of what the Dems will do if they take power — starting with packing the Supreme Court.

It could be that the filibuster has run its course and deserves to be nuked.

But whatever its future, its greatest lesson to politicians should be, "Be very careful what you wish for."

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Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of "The New Reagan Revolution" (St. Martin's Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation.